Components of Emotional Processing in Toddlers with ASD

描述（由申请人提供）：老年ASD患者在情绪信息的实用和自发使用方面表现出缺陷，但对ASD早期阶段的情绪加工知之甚少。我们的初步研究表明，情绪处理的缺陷早在受影响的婴儿12个月时就出现了。在典型的发展中，婴儿在出生后的头几个月发现并倾向于情感线索。这些对有效信息的注意偏差在依恋、沟通、共情和非社会认知的发展中起着至关重要的作用。考虑到自闭症幼儿后期出现的更复杂的情绪处理和调节技能受到影响，本项目研究了早期出现的情绪注意技能，如捕捉、抓住和偏好情感线索。关键问题是：情绪注意缺陷是否普遍存在，影响多种模式（如面部、生物动作和韵律线索）和注意机制（如捕捉、偏见和偏好）？是否保留了特定的情感导向（如恐惧、愤怒和喜悦）？孩子在感知他人情绪线索时的注意偏差和他们自己的情绪功能之间是否存在联系？早期情绪障碍与后期核心和共病症状之间的关系是什么？我们建议在12-24个月大的ASD患儿、发育迟缓（DD）和典型发育（TD） （T1）中对这些问题进行调查，并在36-42个月（T2）时进行前瞻性随访。在第一阶段，我们将使用眼球追踪来评估情绪注意力对面部表情、身体动作和韵律线索的反应。我们还将研究情绪功能和调节技能的体内方面。结合眼动追踪和行为任务将使我们能够以前所未有的方式在综合征出现的早期阶段量化情绪功能，并评估它们对1-2年后结果的独特贡献。这个项目将使我们能够确定情感处理的保留域（在此基础上可以建立治疗框架），确定缺陷域（可能直接用于治疗），推进我们对情绪障碍对ASD核心和共病症状的独特贡献的理解（帮助确定结果的新预测因子和ASD内的同质亚群）。并提出可能阐明情绪注意困难在自闭症病因中的作用的机制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older individuals with ASD show deficits in the pragmatic and spontaneous use of emotional information, but little is known about emotional processing in the early stages of ASD. Our preliminary work suggests that deficits in emotion processing are present as early as at 12 months in the affected infants. In typical development, infants detect and orient towards affective cues in the first months of life. These attentional biases for affectively valenced information play a critical role in the development of attachment, communication, empathy, and non-social cognition. Considering that later-emerging and more complex emotion processing and regulation skills are affected in toddlers with ASD, this project examines early- emerging emotional attention skills such as capture by, hold by, and preference for affective cues. Key questions are: Are deficits in emotional attention general, affecting multiple modalities (e.g. faces, biomotion, and prosodic cues) and attentional mechanisms (e.g., capture, bias, and preference)? Is orienting to specific emotions preserved (e.g. fear, anger, and joy)? Is there an association between the child's attentional biases for perceiving the emotional cues of others and their own emotional functioning? What is the relationship between early emotional dysfunction and later core and comorbid symptoms? We propose to examine these questions in 12-24-month-old toddlers with ASD, developmental delay (DD) and typical development (TD) (T1) followed prospectively at 36-42 months (T2). At T1 we will evaluate aspects of emotional attention in response to facial expressions, body movements, and prosodic cues using eye-tracking. We will also examine in vivo aspects of emotional functioning and regulation skills. Combining eye-tracking and behavioral tasks will allow us to both quantify emotional functioning at the early stage of syndrome emergence in an unprecedented fashion and to evaluate their unique contribution to outcomes 1-2 years later. This project will allow us to identify preserved domains of affective processing (upon which therapies can be scaffolded), identify deficient domains (which may be targeted directly for treatment), advance our understanding of the unique contribution of emotional disturbance to core and comorbid symptoms of ASD (helping to identify novel predictors of outcome and homogenous subgroups within ASD), and suggest mechanisms that may illuminate the role of emotional attention difficulties in the etiology of autism.